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Salon.com Goes to the Bookstore

The most literate daily magazine on the internet publishes a provocative survey of contemporary literature.

The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors
Laura Miller, Editor
Penguin Books
ISBN 0-14-028088-X

For 5 years the internet magazine at www.salon.com has served up what is arguably the most consistently intelligent and diverse content of any e-zine. Reporting on topics that range from news, politics, economics and business to books, movies, celebrities and sex, Salon even outshines most of the old vanguard of print magazines.

And all of this on a daily basis, producing day after day the kind of journalism and criticism that others publish by the week or the month.

Now Salon has moved into print with it first Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors. It's a survey of the contemporary literary scene in 225 essays about major and lesser-known English-speaking writers of fiction and nonfiction.

The question is, Why? Why step outside of the internet, a media which is so well suited to Salon's pithy style and satirical outlook? The explanation is that Salon wants to correct what it sees as a weakness in the book reviews offered by more traditional magazines. Editor Laura Miller explains:

For while most of us read fiction to be moved, captivated, delighted, and provoked, most of today's writing about reading doesn't reflect the intensity of our best (and worst) reading experiences. It's easy to find passionate writing about film and music by critics who know their field and care about it deeply. Mainstream literary criticism is anemic by comparison, and academic literary criticism usually isn't about literature at all. We hope this book helps to change that. In a world packed with easier, flashier opportunities for diversion, many people still do make the choice to read because it satisfies a hunger that only a good book can sate. This volume is our attempt to speak to that craving.

By those criteria, the Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors succeeds. The over 90 contributors to this guide mix a deep appreciation for the written word with a healthy scepticism about conventional literary wisdom. The result is often iconoclastic and surprising. Miller herself, for example, takes Alice Walker to task. She begins by admitting that none of the contributors wanted to write about Walker ("the request was usually greeted with a groan or a visible shudder"), and concludes with the judgment that "For all her celebrations of sex and (historically dubious) ancient, goddess-worshiping cultures, Walker is a Church Lady at heart."

Purists will likely disdain this approach. Comparing Alice Walker to a Saturday Night Live character? Comparing King to Dickens? It sounds like popular movie and music reviewing that Miller mentions in her preface. A pervasive aura of pop culture hangs over the collection, and the contributors occasionally cross the line from criticism to satire. In his review of Cormac McCarthy, for example, film critic A.O. Scott complains that some of McCarthy's novels "read like bad Hemingway, others like bad Hemingway retranslated from Spanish." It's a clever line, but it detracts from what is an otherwise illuminating appraisal of McCarthy's work.

Despite its occasional lapses, though, Salon's Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors succeeds in offering a fresh look at a host of established writers, and in showcasing writers who perhaps haven't received the acclaim they deserve. And for anyone who needs an introduction to (or a refresher course in) contemporary literature, this is probably the best resource on the market.

One of the most helpful things this collection does is to place these writers into a larger literary scene or tradition. For example, the essay on A.S. Byatt's explains Byatt's debt to George Eliot and Iris Murdoch; the one on Doris Lessing examines her connections to Balzac, Tolstoy and Lawrence. And every essay concludes with a "See Also" list of other authors that the reader should consider. These reading-lists are often an education in themselves, as when Maya Jaggi ends her review of V.S. Naipaul by suggesting the works of Amitav Ghosh, Moyez Vassanji, George Lamming and Earl Lovelace.

The result is to offer readers an ever-widening assortment of authors and books to read. It's clear that even though their style is distinctly non-academic, these contributors know their literary history. Thus, in a characteristically learned-but-hip essay on Tom Wolfe, Toby Young dismisses Wolfe's claim to being today's only worthy writer of social realism: "In the hands of Zola and Dickens, social realism was a tool for illuminating the plight of the poor and dispossessed. For Wolfe, it's a slick device for making everyone else look like an idiot."

Smart, entertaining, provocative and wide-ranging, Salon's Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors is a collection that also offers hope about the future of literature. The 225 essays depict a literary world has become more diverse than at any other time in history. "The world of established literary giants, each one solemnly tapping out his version of the Great American Novel on a manual typewriter, has since dissolved into a fluid, unpredictable marketplace where the next critically-acclaimed, hit first novel might be written by a fifty-seven-year-old horse-breeder from North Carolina or by a thirsty-six-year-old former aerobics instructor from India," editor Miller writes.

That, in itself, is cause for celebration.